Police violence against Occupy movement gets less visible but more extreme

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I don't know. Maybe it's true, BUT given the fact that last fall DUers and OWS went on and on about how they were "peacefully protesting" when the cameras showed it was anything BUT peaceful protests and that the police were justified in their actions based on the protesters behaviors................

they have no credibility and it probably ISN'T TRUE.

Star Member starroute (9,593 posts)

Police violence against Occupy movement gets less visible but more extreme
Anyone who thinks we're still dealing with a system of legitimate authority hasn't been paying attention.

A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast. . . .

“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th . When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast. . . . Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”

Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken. She proceeded to launch into a careful, well-nigh clinical blow-by-blow description of what had happened. An experienced activist, she knew to go limp when police seized her, and how to do nothing that could possibly be described as resisting arrest. Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting “stop resisting!” as she shouted back “I’m not resisting!” At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of marshal-arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. “I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist—at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it. After that they put me in plastic cuffs, as tightly as they possibly could, and wouldn’t loosen them for at least an hour no matter how loud I screamed or how much the other prisoners begged them to help me. For a while everyone in the arrest van was chanting ‘take them off, take them off’ but they just ignored them…” . . .

The message here is clear. Law has nothing to do with it. Anyone who engages in Occupy Wall Street-related activity should know they can be arrested, for virtually any reason, at any time. Many of these arrests are carried out in such a way to guarantee physical injury. The tone was set on that first night of March 17, when my friend Eileen’s wrists were broken; others suffered broken fingers, concussions, and broken ribs. Again, this was on a night where OWS actions were confined to sitting in a park, playing music, raising one or two tents, and marching down the street.

Star Member Mnemosyne (14,037 posts)
1. And Hillary is in China scolding them for human rights abuses, why? Despicable actions,

When America accepts this as necessary, whether it's the Feds, the mayors and police chiefs, or the public taking the law into their own hands, and starts acting on it, America will be able to start moving towards justice.

Until then, good fucking luck.

Star Member The Magistrate (77,645 posts)
3. Agreed, Ma'am: These People Are So Over the Line, They Might As Well Be Stasi

Leftist Agitator (2,754 posts) Profile Journal Send DU Mail Ignore
6. If you really want them to stop this shit, there are very few ways to accomplish that goal...

The best (albeit the most utterly horrible and disgusting) is to make them aware that they are jeopardizing the welfare of their family when they do things like this. And I don't mean in some abstract, "what hurts one hurts all of us" sense either, I mean that they need to know that if and when they act this way, their wives, husbands and children will be hurt in reprisal.

Yes, I know, it's abhorrent, and very illegal. I also know that this will be a very unpopular point of view. But it's an effective tactic, and one that protestors need to seriously consider. Today, it's broken wrists and sexual humiliation. Tomorrow, it's live ammo and being disappeared. Cops are used to putting their own lives on the line, as it were.

They aren't used to having to worry that if they cross the line, their loved ones will suffer as a result. Yes, some will react to the new threat with even more overt hostility, but most will try to protect what's theirs, and those who don't soon will when the first reports of reprisal filter back them.

And then they wonder why the government is tracking them and infiltrating them in order to know what they are doing.

That's how they got those 5 guys that were going to blow up a bridge.....from anarchist talk at an occupy camp.

Zalatix (3,640 posts)

8. This is why I scarcely see the need for cops. This is all they do anymore.

And by the end of this century they'll ONLY exist to protect the Plutocracy.

Everyone who thinks they need the police for protection? Your kids or grandkids will be asking you "since when did the police ever protect us?"

They have no duty to protect you. They will, however, ALWAYS rise to protect the Plutocracy. Something much worse than lawlessness is coming, it's called a Plutonomy. It'll happen in this century.